1. Field of the Art
Generally, payment processing for online retail businesses is described. Specifically, third party assisted payment card processing and fraud detection are described.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
A “hosted order page” (HOP) is a third-party hosted webpage that accepts payment information from customers on behalf of merchants. A merchant website typically redirects a customer to a HOP on the third-party's domain/server when the customer selects a ‘Buy’ or ‘Checkout’ button from an online shopping cart. Once at the HOP, the customer inputs payment information, such as credit card information. The third-party, which is neither the merchant nor the customer, uses the payment information entered by the customer to process the payment transaction for the merchant so that the merchant can avoid handling the customer's payment information, and thereby avoid the cost and effort of complying with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and government regulations regarding storing sensitive payment information.
A “silent order post” (SOP) is akin to a HOP but with only the sensitive textboxes and other input controls being hosted by the third party. That is, the merchant hosts the order page but the sensitive fields, such as the credit card number and expiration date entry textboxes, are posted only to the third party's servers.
Oftentimes merchants rely on third-parties to apply fraud detection screens to individual purchase transactions and, in real time, advise the merchants regarding whether to deny transactions because the risk of fraud is too high or to accept transactions because the risk is low or otherwise acceptable. For such third-party fraud detection screens to be particularly useful, adequate information about the purchase transactions needs to be provided, including payment information as well as order information. Payment information includes, for example, credit card number, billing address, and expiration date. On the other hand, order information includes information such as item descriptions, shipping instructions (next day, overnight, etc.), special instructions (e.g., gift wrapping requested), etc. However, in transactions where third-party entities use HOPs or SOPs to obtain payment information directly from consumers on behalf of merchants, these third-party entities have no way of also obtaining order information, and thus can only use payment information when evaluating fraud risk in transactions.